[383]. This seems to be no place-name, but a name formed, as the Turks formed the name Istambol, from hearing the Greeks constantly talking of going “εις την πολιν”—“to the city,” meaning Constantinople.
[384]. Probably the promontory of Sigeum, at the mouth of the Dardanelles. It might be called Ægisness, from its being at the entrance to the Ægean Sea. It is called Engilsness in the saga of “King Sigurd the Jorsala-farer,” and it is stated that Sigurd’s fleet also lay here for a fortnight waiting a side-wind, that they might show off their sails (which they had stitched over with silks) as they passed up to Constantinople. There was, however, a town called Ægos, at the mouth of a stream of the same name, near the northern end of the Dardanelles, a little below the modern Gallipoli.
[386]. Manuel I., successor of John Comnenus, who reigned from 1143 to 1180.
[387]. Dýraksborg must be Durazzo, the ancient Dyrachium, a seaport in Albania, on the Adriatic, opposite to Brundusium in Italy.
[388]. Pull, the ancient Apulia or Puglia, in Italy, on the opposite shore of the Adriatic from Dyrachium. Apulia had been under the dominion of its Norman dukes from the middle of the eleventh century, and this may have been the reason why the route homewards through Apulia was chosen both by Sigurd the Jorsala-farer and Earl Rögnvald.
[389]. Hákon Herdabreid (the broad-shouldered) became King in 1161. (For an account of his death, and that of King Ingi and Gregorius Dagson, see the sagas of the sons of Harald Gilli and Hákon Herdabreid, in the Heimskringla.)
[390]. Near Bergen.
[391]. Viken, in the south of Norway.
[392]. Bishop’s-tongues, a district lying between three rivers in the south of Iceland, also mentioned in the Njáls Saga.